


Redux

by Recycling



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Angst, Blood, Body Horror, Brain Surgery, F/F, Gore, No sex in this one, Self-Harm, self-surgery, seriously kinda gory if that's not for you skip this one, unless you count the inherent homoeroticism of self-imposed brain surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:33:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27768340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Recycling/pseuds/Recycling
Summary: Harrow knew she could do this.  She had done it before, and she would do it again.Brain surgery redux.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 13
Kudos: 39





	Redux

She had not meant to wake up. At least, she had not meant to wake up _here_. She had gone to sleep safe, cocooned a coffin with a rock rolled over the entrance of The Tomb. She was not there any longer. Now, she found herself lying on a bed, in a room lit only by the light of a horizon-bound sun peeking through the curtains. Her clothes were unfamiliar and rough against her skin, and her entire body ached as she threw off a blanket and stumbled towards one of two doors in the room. Every muscle in her screamed against the effort as she lurched through the door and fell, barely reaching out in time to catch herself on the sink. Fumbling around for the light switch, she managed to activate a struggling, yellow light overhead that barely illuminated the area. The room was a moldering mess of decay, tiles missing from the once-white walls and floor like knocked out teeth. 

Harrowhark Nonagesimus looked into the mirror and held back a scream as golden eyes stared back.

 _No_. This was wrong. She had buried herself deep enough that Gideon should have been safe, but clearly something had failed. Gideon had been here. Harrow trusted that Septimus was telling the truth,and the fact that her body was still in tact and she still alive lent even more credence to the hypothesis. Gideon had been here and alive and well and _something_ had pulled Harrow back to kill her again. Unacceptable. Her eyes were here, so she was still present somewhere, and Harrow would chose eternal damnation over being party to her murder a second time. 

She knew what she had to do. She had done it before, and she could do it again. The alternative was unthinkable. Failure was not an option, not this time. The stakes were too high.  
In a moment of weakness, Harrow pressed a hand to her chest and whispered.

“It’s ok. I promise I’ll do better this time.” 

Shuffling the pain out of her system, she returned to the room with the bed. She should have taken time to rewrite the letters entirely, planned for every contingency as she had done before, but she only made two. Pulling out a molar, she reformed it into a sharp quill, stabbing it into her cheek to draw out the blood-ink. Her tongue played with the empty, bleeding socket as she concentrated on her task, trying to make it hurt even as it healed too rapidly. She wanted to ground herself and remember everything she needed to say. The letters were written hastily, scribbled out in blood on the sheets of the bed. One for herself, with a list of dangerous entities, one to give to anyone on her list that might need to understand what she had done. She could rewrite it later, make it more refined, but with two eyes in her head that did not belong to her, she was short on time.

Returning to the sink, she dampened her hair and got to work. The first parts were easy. Sliding a razor-sharp piece of bone out of the metacarpal in her right thumb should have hurt, but adrenaline kept her from feeling the skin splitting to allow for the extrusion. She had not even fully realized the injury until blood dripped on to her head as she shaved it. The same shard served to sever the flesh of her scalp, a long, lateral line high up on her forehead. Pulling it back was difficult, as the flesh fought to knit itself together, but eventually she managed to peel it far enough that it finally sat still and wrinkled over her occipital lobe, thrown back like a discarded, crumpled cloak. The pain had started creep through, and she hastily reached for her adrenal glands to up their hormone production and keep her going; the same way the Saint of Joy had taught her to stimulate her hypothalamus. It was faster than seeking out the pain receptors and blocking them individually, even if that would have been a more elegant solution.

Now came the hard part, severing the skull. As a skilled bone adept, Harrow should have found it easy to work with bone. But her specialty lay in creating and remolding, not in severing and destroying. She snapped off the razor bone from her hand, forming it into a serrated blade and attempting to saw. It would have been easier for someone with greater strength and a better angle, but she did not have that second person. And, selfishly, Harrow could not help breathing a sigh of relief that Ianthe was not here for this one. Not here to intrude on such an intimate moment where she did not belong. No, only she and Gideon were here, and that thought was a small comfort at least. It felt right, the two of them tangled up together again, just for a moment. As it always had been, and as it always should be. Even though Harrow was going to undo it all. 

The serrated bone was proving futile, the skull knitting itself back together faster than Harrow could part it and she sobbed aloud in frustration. She was involuntarily burning up the soul she was attempting to save, and she had no idea what damage that was causing. Casting the blade aside, she took a deep breath and pressed her fingers into her exposed skull. Concentrating on the feeling out each strand of osseous fiber, the molecules bounded to each other and the structures laying intertwined with each. It took too long, but eventually she felt, more than understood, the cornerstone of the structure that allowed her to dissolve the bone. Grey dust fell onto brain matter and she plunged her fingers in. She had to keep focusing, willing the bone to stay back from trying to recover its usual structure, giving her just enough of an opening to complete the work. 

The pink folds of her brain squelched under her fingers and wriggled as the material tried to knit itself back together around her digits. Blood flowed freely, coating her hands and falling down her forehead and the back of her skull. The only sound in the room the _drip drip drip_ of the thick liquid onto the floor as she worked. Blinking the bloody flow out of her borrowed eyes, she willed herself to stop shaking, to be steady and forge ahead. Her fingers continued to probe through until she felt a sinking hollowness in her gut. _There_. She held her hands still, index fingers pushed down into the brain tissue up to the second knuckle, and then pulled back slightly. 

Selfishly, and foolishly, she allowed herself a deep breath and a moment of remembrance before she continued on. Gideon holding her in the pool and granting an absolution she would never deserve. Gideon picking her up with elation after offering to stand for the Sixth. Gideon fighting like a glorious wildfire, swinging her two-hander with joy and abandon. Gideon dappled in sunlight and shadow, forgiving her at the end of it all. A crooked smile and golden eyes that made Harrow’s heart sing. 

And that was enough, because it had to be. 

“Just a moment, beloved, hold on for just a moment,” she whispered to the empty room. 

Calling up the grey dust from her dissolved skull, she delicately built a construct to replace her fingers. The bone pressed down into her brain, a living entity to ward against the murderous memories. She had to be fast now, before the process worked too well and she forgot why she had undertaken it at all. The construct in place, she extended her skull to cover back over the opening, bone knitting together as if it had never been separated. _That_ she was good at. Grabbing her scalp from where it had fallen down her head, she wetly slid it to its proper place with such force that the mirror in front of her was splattered with blood. The flesh hastily knit itself back together, as if it had never been severed at all. She stared at her foreign eyes in the mirror as everything began to get foggy. What was she doing? Why in the world had she cut herself open? Why… 

She sank to the floor and into oblivion.  


~

Harrowhark Nonagesimus came back to consciousness at the sound of someone entering the room. She stared up from the dirty floor at the flickering, yellow light in the ceiling, unsure of how she got there. Two figures stood in the doorway. The first she recognized as Camilla Hect, but the second was too far in shadow for her to see. Harrow tried to push herself up into a sitting position, but her hands slipped in the puddle of blood surrounding her. She fell back to the floor, landing with a _crack_ of her skull against the tile. She lay still. The second figure almost surged forward, but Hect held them back with a warning hand and a spoken order of “Wait.” 

Harrow looked up from her place on the floor, and managed to croak out, “Where are we?”

That was enough, apparently. The second figure broke past Camilla and slid to the ground next to Harrow, a hand coming to cradle the back of her bloody head with so much tenderness she inexplicably felt her heart break. 

“What the _fuck_ did you do, Nonagesimus?” asked the unfamiliar redhead, staring down at her with eyes blacker than night. 

Harrow did not know how to answer that, so she remained silent as she took her sleeve and wiped at the river of blood pouring out of her nose.

**Author's Note:**

> I got a little tipsy, I got a little sad, I wrote about a little brain surgery. Logistically, I know perfect lyctorhood probably would not work with one party fully unconscious but it led me down the path of maximum angst so I ran with it. Thanks for reading!


End file.
